1. Field of the Invention
The present invention concerns creation of printer instances in a printers folder on a workstation. More particularly, the present invention concerns remotely creating a printer instance in the printers folder of a workstation by performing an operation in a control point terminal to add a new printer to the printers folder, whereby identification information of the printer is transmitted to an agent in a client workstation such that the agent, utilizing the identification information, automatically obtains and installs printer configuration and print driver information of the printer and creates the instance of the printer in the printers folder.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, printer instances are created in a windows operating system by a user performing operations at the workstation. For instance, U.S. Pat. No. 5,692,111 to Marbry et al. (hereinafter referred to as the “'111 patent”) describes a process in which a user adds a new server based printer in the windows registry of their workstation by browsing the network and selecting the server based printer that he/she wants to add. Upon selecting the server based printer, printer configuration files and print driver files for the selected printer are retrieved from a network bindery and are installed on the user's workstation, after which an instance of the server based printer is created in the user's windows registry. This process works well for installing printers at the workstation itself, but has problems relating to network management. More specifically, the foregoing process requires that either a user at each workstation add the printer, or that a network administrator physically go to each workstation and add the printer. It can readily be seen that the former requires each individual user to have some knowledge about the printer they want to add, while the latter is very time consuming for the administrator, particularly where a printer needs to be added to numerous computers. As a result of the former, some less sophisticated users may not select the most appropriate printer to add. Moreover, the foregoing process requires the user/administrator to be physically present at each workstation, thereby needlessly wasting the administrator's time. An additional problem with the '111 patent's approach is that, because the printer is part of a server based printing system, the printer is required to be set-up and configured on a print server before a user can install the printer on their workstation and submit a print job to the printer. Therefore, although the printer may be physically connected to the network, the printer is not able to be utilized until an administrator sets-up the printer in the print server.
Some techniques have been proposed for remotely adding printers to the printers folder of a workstation. One such technique requires at least some user action, such as logging-on to a network, in order to add a printer to the printers folder of a workstation. Because at least some user action is required, this technique is not truly remote and as a result, updates to the network configuration are not timely reflected in the workstation until the user action is performed. Another technique has been proposed in which an administrator creates, for example, an executable file that the administrator downloads to, and executes on, the workstation. While this technique may be more remote than the foregoing technique, this technique can nonetheless be time consuming for the administrator and, among other things, requires that the administrator be learned in the programming language that the file is written in. Thus, while these techniques perform remote creation of printer instances on a workstation, they do so in a way that each have their own drawbacks and which is fundamentally different than the technique proposed by the present invention.